Blackberry Classic

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BBC News:

Blackberry has launched what it calls a “no-nonsense” smartphone, the Blackberry Classic.

A phone designed to stem the flow of losses.

Johnnie Walker commercial

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A Johnny Walker commercial, embedded in a video showing how the spot was filmed. Fantastic to see this all unfold. Notice the starting and ending parties are the same, bookends on a theme. Also, note that the actor wore wires all the way through, even walking through the seemingly solid doorway.

A rare, in depth Jeff Bezos interview

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Business Insider CEO Henry Blodget is a long time Amazon investor. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is an investor in Business Insider. Blodget invited Bezos on stage at this year’s Ignition conference for an interview. Bezos does not do a lot of interviews, let alone one of this length and scope.

The video of the complete interview is below. Follow the headline link for the text excerpts, with video excerpts and some interesting sidebars.

Samsung in talks to launch Apple Pay competitor

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Re/code:

Samsung has discussed a deal with a payments startup that would help the smartphone maker unveil a wireless mobile payments system in 2015 to rival Apple, according to multiple sources.

Samsung at it again.

iOS 8 App Development Becomes a “Bring Me a Rock” Game

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Adam Engst, writing for TidBITS:

The common thread that ties these disparate apps together is that all are trying to take advantage of iOS 8’s new Extensibility features. Those include custom keyboards, Notification Center widgets, custom Share actions and extensions, photo and video editing extensions, and document provider extensions — iMore has a comprehensive explanation of Extensibility.

The problem is that Apple has not published clear guidelines about what is acceptable.

There are a lot of issues related to the App Store that are troubling developers.

Dozens more companies sign up for Apple Pay

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New York Times:

On Tuesday, Apple announced that in recent weeks the company had signed up dozens more banks, retail stores and start-ups to adopt Apple Pay, the company’s new e-commerce product, which allows customers to buy things with little more than a wave of their iPhone.

Lots of progress here.

Intel and Apple, an incredible missed opportunity

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Jean-Louis Gassée takes on Intel, pointing out a missed opportunity (Intel passed on a chance to be the sole supplier of iPhone processors) and a lack of focus on mobile, and on Apple in particular.

The growth of the App Store

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Om Malik breaks down a report on App Store revenue from Macquarie Capital Research, giving us some very interesting numbers.

Off to work at 

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Jeremy Foo writes about his 4 year pursuit of a development job at Apple.

Apple releases “The Song”

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From Apple’s holiday campaign comes this sweet film about a girl’s gift to her grandmother.

Tumblr year in review

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Great collection of links. Not all of these clicked for me, but lots of them did.

Predicting hard drive failure using SMART stats

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Read the linked blog post to learn about hard drive failure, what SMART does and does not do well, and the decisions Backblaze makes to minimize drive failure, maximize their chances of catching a drive failure before it happens.

You have a package

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This is not news, just an interesting experience.

Replacing your Apple ID account recovery key

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There’s been a lot of discussion over the past few days about Apple ID two-step verification and the fact that Apple can’t restore your account if you lose your recovery key. Here’s how to do it.

Lessons learned about HealthKit from Duke and Oschner

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Duke University in North Carolina and Oschner Health System in Louisiana are two of the first hospitals to incorporate HealthKit into their day-to-day operations. Duke’s Dr. Ricky Bloomfield and Oschner’s Dr. Richard Milani spoke about their experiences at the mHealth Summit earlier this week.

NPR’s 50 Favorite Albums Of 2014

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This was a fun exploration, walked me round some excellent music without depending on bestseller lists. I love how much of this music is either completely self or independently produced.

Parable of the polygons

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Interesting visualization tool. You start with a mix of triangles and squares. There are rules that determine whether a shape is happy or not, based on the neighboring shapes being the same type (bias). Hard to explain, but spend a minute stepping through each scenario and you’ll see the point of the exercise.